Ok so I’m putting women and alcohol on the same level. Sin and Sin again some may say. And sadly, India is not the only place where both are highly prejudiced.
But in India at least there is an underlying reason which explains it all. A vessel that links foreign women and booze. Three letters …
Goa.
How did this happen? Follow my words…
As I do not want to bore my very few readers to death, I will divide this article in 2 parts.
Part 1 – Women
Goa has many names: city of sin, city of wine, city of the Portuguese Inquisition.
The smallest state in India yet the most frowned upon.
Goa started out its road towards fame by being a Portuguese port. There, Saint Xavier, one of the founders of the Jesuit order – with his friend Ignacio from Loyola – was an active converter. In fact, the Church was so adamant about converting Hindus to Christianism that the hundreds of temples of the State were destroyed by the Portuguese. The Inquisition played a scary and famous role in making of Goa one of the most renowned places in India.
Yet, by the 1970’s this bloodthirsty past was very well over.
The vicious members of the Portuguese Inquisition – I won’t describe what kind of torture they used on recalcitrant Hindus because this is a food blog after all – gave way to vicious people of another kind.
Hippies.
In the 1970’s, Goa became the hub for nudists, hashish and trance music. People knew how to have fun back then. Sex, drugs and swimming naked in the ocean were basically the 3 main activities of the westerners living on the Goan coasts.
Consequently, as you may imagine, local Indians were a little taken aback (major understatement). Indian men probably didn’t mind having a pot-headed, dreadlocked, all-loving western girlfriend but they sure as hell didn’t approve of them.
Because you see, Indians are pretty conservative when it comes to women.
Women should be covered by clothing from shoulder to toe. They should be married by age 23 – with a male selected by the family of course. And then wear signs of their married status in order not to entice other men.
Oh, and trains have separate wagons for men and women of course.
So when foreign women in Goa started showing their assets a little bit too conspicuously, people started thinking. They started to think that foreign women were easy (to put it nicely). And now, for this reason, I have to wear big bangles when walking alone in Mumbai.
Hilarious !
ReplyDeleteI will definitely think of you when I go to Goa ;-)
Keep up the good work, love your blog
"Because you see, Indians are pretty conservative when it comes to women.
ReplyDeleteWomen should be covered by clothing from shoulder to toe. They should be married by age 23 – with a male selected by the family of course. And then wear signs of their married status in order not to entice other men."
It may hold true now but historically and even as late as the 1960's this was not true. Many states, mostly the ones in south of India had what you can loosely call, a topless culture. The earliest anthropological works on the peoples, clothing and living standards of India (check colonial writings) very frequently described women who wore no upper cloth. It became a fashion, acceptable, respectable and then a norm in these parts for women to cover their upper half after colonial ideas and their victorian values came to be seen as superior.
Even as late as the 60’s and 70’s you could easily come across women who wore no upper cloth on beaches.
Towards the end of the colonial era in India there were even revolts against people of upper stature because women of lesser statures wanted to wear upper clothes.
Being fully covered- a sign of female modesty is a Victorian idea that Bollywood happily took on and propagated. So this covering business is seen among the higher and middle classes, at least in the last few decades. Our grandmothers and their mothers were never so conscious about their body as we women are made to feel today. Also, if you get the chance compare movies in other Indian languages with Bollywood movies of the 40s and 50s. You will find much more skin show and what you would now call ‘vulgarity'
So when you say that Indians want their women to be covered from head to toe don’t make it sound like Indians are regressive and therefore allow no body show. Understand it as something the Indian population went through a few centuries ago in order to match up to the standards of the colonials. It is a pity that India has held on to these victorian values. Therefore it sees anything outside it as perverse and worthy of being condemned.
P.S. One of the best things about local trains is that it has separate compartments for women. Unless you have travelled by them in the peak hours where one cannot get a millimetre to move you will not be able to understand why it is so convenient for women to be pressed against each others body rather than be pressed against the bodies of men who are strangers and in all probability (owing to the high temperature) stink by the end of the day.